Mark Zuckerberg is nothing if not persistent, doesn’t care who knows. Ever since Snapchat turned down his $3 billion offer to buy the company, he has been working away to create a similar app. In fact you could say it has become something of an obsession.
Within days of being turned down, Facebook was working on a Snapchat clone. Using the company’s vast software potential, within 12 days, Zuckerberg, who takes an extremely active role in developing new products, had come up with something. Facebook Poke was pretty much a copycat of Snapchat, but even with an stylish and ironic welcome from Evan Spiegel, the market completely ignored it.
Never one to say die, Zuckerberg came up with Slingshot, insisting that this was a worthwhile new concept… it might have been, but it too went down the pan, never to be heard of again.
Hoping to be lucky on the third attempt, in November 2015, Zuckerberg tried again to create ephemeral messaging, this time using Facebook Messenger, which had just gone over to end-to-end encryption. The launch took place in France, with the idea of rolling out the service in other countries later… which of course never happened, because nobody used it. Zuckerberg was certainly right when he described Snapchat as a “privacy phenomenon”. It was also a phenomenon that was proving extremely elusive and difficult to imitate.
